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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

You type a lot more than 0.5% of the time.

It's a trade-off between spending some time thinking about what should be written, and then typing a little - or spending all the time typing, typing, typing, and rewriting.

I don't think I've ever been in a job where I was limited by typing speed.

Then you should definitely consider switching keyboard layouts to reduce RSI. I did, last week. Going from 80wpm to 30 wpm is definitely a job impediment (in the short term). So many things are keyboard driven:

- communicating with peers over slack

- writing code / git commands

- writing email, comments in HN, documentation, etc.

- taking notes in meetings

- all the browser shortcuts

- all the CLI readline shortcuts

Yes. I've love to be able to type fast enough to take notes so that I don't have to try to read my chicken scratch handwriting and figure out what the hell I was trying to write, especially when referring to notes where I don't have any recollection of what the contents were.

I never thought about RSI, but also I've started having pain/weakness in my right hand last month (that, thankfully, has mostly gone away). The doc said it was tendenitis.

I feel like excessive swipe-typing with my thumb may have contributed more than typing to that; but I also play keyboards and it was scary for a second to have that affected.

I got myself a vertical mouse; will consider using another layout (which one do you use?). I do type at 75-80WPM (including time to fixe typos), can that really cause RSI?

I don't know if I'll be able to pull off even 20wpm with another layout, but looks like it's the next step. Thanks for suggesting it!

In my experience, typing early and rapidly iterating and modifying, i.e. thinking on the page, is FAR more effective than spending tons of time in your own head trying to solve the problem elegantly before you ever type anything.

The exception to this might be spending time thinking about the very high level structure you want, since the initial structure you start with can lock you into pattern of trying to solve the problem that might not be the most effective.

Not an amount of time where typing more efficiently is going to matter. Once you hit intermediate competency it stops mattering.

Yes, but typing speed is still not too important.

There is some threshold where it absolutely impacts productivity. If you haven't seen this in action, you're lucky, I've ran into more than one Engineer who is otherwise very smart but somehow never learned to type.

For sure. If you're a hunt-and-peck typer, it makes meetings where we're waiting for someone to finish typing unbearable. If you're even somewhat competent at typing, then I don't think it's a big pain point.

I'd say that threshold is closer to 40 wpm than 160 wpm.

I'm glad I'm a fast typer because I can spend less time replying to pointless emails.

I also spend less than 15% of my time drinking coffee.

I'm typing even less these days with tools like copilot.

For some reason I don’t like any of this automation tools. I find VSCode unbearable even without copilot. Too many things happen when I type. I prefer linting and that’s about all I want to write my code peacefully. I use vim in iTerm and it’s all I ever need. Jump off to Pycharm to debug if needed.

I use vim quite a bit too, just sayin...

https://github.com/github/copilot.vim

Oh boy..., I guess there are people who find this useful. I respect "To each their own" and "You do you".

I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs. Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.

About 3-5% of the time, copilot poops out an unexpectedly clever code block that makes it worth it to me, if nothing else but for the surprise factor.

For the remaining 95%… I’ve configured it to delay doing anything until 10000ms passes so it doesn’t get in the way

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